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Category Archives: genealogy

I remember the many frustrating hours I spent in C and C++ dealing with arrays. I remember the nights hunting down the cause of a bug, only to realize it was the result of exceeding my array bounds. I remember having to redefine and copy arrays when I wanted to change the number of elements in the array, because in C, array length is fixed.

When I learned about linked lists, it got better. Rather than allocating a specific chunk of memory, like a static array did, linked lists are much more flexible because each element simply contains a memory pointer to the next one. This is very flexible, because you can add, remove, or change the nodes in a linked list quite easily.

However, accessing the elements of a linked list is more complicated than accessing an array. In an array, if you wanted to loop through and output all the elements of an array, you could do the following:

However, the linked list really showed its limitation when trying to access elements randomly. You can do the following with a C array, but not a linked list:

cout << arrMyArray[27];

Thankfully, in C++, the standard template library introduced vectors, which are a kind of dynamic array. The stl::vector saved me a lot of headaches once I learned how to use it.

In C#, you can use what are called generic lists, which are like C++ vectors. As I was programming my GEDCOM importer last night, I really came to appreciate generic lists. They have all the conveniences of the C array and the C++ vector. You can create them dynamically, but you can also access them just like an array. They’re really easy to use, too:

In my spare time at home, I usually have one or a few projects I work on for fun. When I get my muse, I become obsessed with creativity; my one-track mind can scarcely think about anything else except the function I am working on. This usually lasts until I get excited about something else which takes over my passion like a democrat is going to take over the White House in November.

Thankfully, my dear sweet wife is very understanding of my incessant need to create, and she lets me lock myself up for a few hours a week to work. After this last month of being Mr. Mom, I have come to appreciate this support from my wife more than ever.

Anyway, my latest obsession has been programming an automatic short-story generator. It uses artificial intelligence to create characters and plots, randomizes them together, and churns them out in dry third-person prose. It’s never going to be Jane Austen, but what do you expect from a computer? It’s not like my PC went to college to get a degree in English.

Before that, it was a GEDCOM importer for my online genealogy website, ActiveFamilyTree.com. Sometimes, I would like to build a time machine just so I can go back and tell the guy who created the GEDCOM format about the benefits of well-formed XML. That project is still unfinished, just like most of the other hobby projects I’ve started in the last ten years. If there were a job that involved creating things and never finishing them, I would be awesome at it.